WEBVTT
Kind: captions
Language: en
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(Brad Traver)
The world knows about this park as a place for
petrified wood. It's been a hundred
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years that we've known about that
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but it's only the last ten years we've
known about the animals that were alive
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at that time in the same area
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and have begun to explore them
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find them out in the field and begin to
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tell their stories.
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There's a richness of the paleontology
story that's just beginning to be told
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at this park and it's very exciting. It's
a globally interesting story.
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(Bill Parker)
In 2004 I was hiking out in the
desert with a group of geologists ant I came
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across a hill covered in fossil bone.
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Upon returning to the hill and re-examining it realized that all of the
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belong to this animal called a Revueltosaurus.
00:01:23.030 --> 00:01:27.759
Revueltosaurus was previously
only known from fossil teeth so any bones
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we found of this animal were new to science.
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So here we had at the Revueltosaurus quarry
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the flat area at the top is where we've
systematically excavated trough the years
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and uncovered all these skeletons.
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The low hill, when i first found it,
was completely covered in bones.
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There's a grid setup, you can see with
the rope and everything, that's for mapping.
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This blue gray layer right here is the
layer that we found the animals in.
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We came up the drainage here
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and right about here there was a skeleton
of an animal coming out.
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And in 2004 there was a skeleton over there. In 2005 we got another one here,
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and in 2006 we got one here.
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This entire flat area here is what we did
in 2012 and the big
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skeleton came from right here.
00:02:12.900 --> 00:02:15.510
So when you have numerous skeletons of the same animal
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and really well preserved like we have
here where we have whole skulls
00:02:19.489 --> 00:02:21.339
you can look at things like
00:02:21.339 --> 00:02:26.200
bite force of the jaws or
reconstruct all the musculature of the skull
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or section the bones and look at their
growth history.
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We always dream of finding a quarry like this
because we can get a lot more information
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out of it than just a single skeleton or
single find somewhere else
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so it's a really unique opportunity.
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Once the jacket makes it back to the prep
lab we have specially-trained
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technicians call fossil preparators
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and they cut open and remove
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the top of this plaster jacket. Then they can
actually start removing the rock from
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all the bones and as you can see they're very
delicate, they're very small, and it's a lot
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of tedious time-consuming work. It could
take months to years to actually free
00:03:05.080 --> 00:03:08.059
the bones from the rock.
00:03:08.059 --> 00:03:12.129
Once the fossil preparatory actually frees
the bone from the rock then we can look
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at how the bones actually fit together
and try to figure out what the animal looked like
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and we take isolated skull bones like
this one, there's little notches here on the sides
00:03:21.109 --> 00:03:24.709
where other skull bones actually fit in.
It's almost like a big jigsaw puzzle
00:03:24.709 --> 00:03:28.849
we can fit the skull together
and then we can recreate what the entire
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skull would have looked like.
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This bone here is this bone here,
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this ridge here is this ridge here.
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This is the eye, you can see the teeth.
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This part here is this part here,
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the back of the head's here. One of the most amazing things about this park is everytime I go
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out in the field I find something.
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And a lot of times it has the chance
of being something new.
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So this place is so rich in fossils
that it makes it a natural laboratory
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to study the paleontology of this time period
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and the finds that we find here actually
generate research across the globe.